Since when has South America been "off shore" of the US?

That would have been Sin surely? Admittedly Sin was rushed to release to beat Half Life, but Half Life was hardly unique in trying to expand FPS games beyond the limited gaming of Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake

"Local releases in the US often commands a much higher price then the same title overseas." - are you fucking insane? The US has the cheapest prices for media (games, CDs, films, bluray, DVD, books) in the developed world! Yes, stuff will be cheaper in Vietnam or China or wherever, but it'll be easily 2x the price in Europe, Japan, or Australia.

Analogue TV is currently being shut down in the UK - last region(s) in about a year, so complaining that an analogue TV recorder is no longer usable is a little weird surely? May as well have a moan about the government turning off your TV while you're at it!

At what point was Clinton involved in the KKK? Yes, he brushed off Byrd's past, but if that's "a leader of the KKK" then GWB is "a leader of Al-Qaeda" and Cheney "a leader in Saddam Hussein's government"

It's quite possible you just haven't noticed them (they're sort of hidden away) but afaik they're available world wide with the exception of Australia. Certainly when they were launched in Japan I think it was one of the last tranches of a worldwide roll out.

The big difference is that wikia is for-profit (and set up by the same people behind wikipedia - the profit motive is quite likely the reason they banned all the fluff from wikipedia in the first place!)

Facticious? A most cromulent word it seems

He tried to start a war on two fronts

Either you meant "her" or I missed out something of a shocking revelation on my last read-through

TNG was pretty much entirely model based (not CGI) - Star Trek didn't really CGI up until mid-way through Deep Space Nine, ironically using the guys who did the CGI for the first few years of Babylon 5 (and Babylon 5 used CGI purely because their budget was so tiny, you really have to give them credit for puching way above their weight the way they did)

Mod parent up - the fact Iran isn't an Arab country is a significant part of why the Arab states all hate the place (they even tried to wipe out the Iranians a few hundred years ago, did about a good a job as the Nazis did to the Jews, and the Iranians certainly haven't forgotten)

All phones on a particular network, on a particular radio technology - important detail there (Yes, Softbank aped the FOMA connector for their 3G phones, but the two networks' 2G phone connectors are entirely different, then you have AU etc etc)

A quick google gives 227 million results for (hiragana) 6 million for (katakana) and 34 million for (kanji) though there's an element of linking there (where the kanji search gives pages that only have kana) so the results are totally unscientific. I also didn't say that people in Yokohama are illiterate - just that if you honestly think that most Japanese people can actually write all the jouyou kanji from memory you are sadly mistaken - why do you think that "wapuro-baka" was coined. I'm sure that at some point they knew how to write them all, but they've forgotten over time. I for one have forgotten plenty of things that I studied far more recently than when I was 16, and I don't think of myself as an idiot - there's only so many things that one can remember.

I'm not saying that the Japanese are illiterate - I'm just saying that the "99% literacy" rate is a myth - it should be obvious from how much more complex the written Japanese language is than English / French / etc. There are plenty of sources that say that "Japan has an amazing 99% literacy rate" without mentioning that the 99% figure is an assumed rate from a UN study which grants the same 99% rate to all the other developed first-world countries. There's also the issue of "literacy" vs "practical literacy" - the UK has been concentrating on the latter for a while even though it has a seemingly high literacy rate